John Wells: How Showtime's 'Shameless' Almost Didn't Happen

Showtime

"Shameless"

Showtime’s newest hit Shameless was a long time coming — eight years with stops at two other networks — for executive producer John Wells.
 
For Wells, the adaptation of the BBC series about a working-class family whose kids wind up parenting their drunk father, the bulk of getting Shameless to the small screen on Showtime started with a two-year process securing rights from the BBC series' Channel Four and Company Pictures that creator Paul Abbott — an exec producer on the remake — didn’t own.

Then the network shuffle began.
 
“It was casually at NBC for awhile while Ben Silverman was there,” Wells said. “He said he wanted to do it and he had done a lot of British imports.
 
“We had a very lengthy negotiation to figure out how to get the rights over,” Wells told The Hollywood Reporter on Friday at TCA. "I was always very concerned that we wouldn’t be able to do the content — not that it has to be exactly the same — but that a certain pulling back of it would make it not the same show.”
 
From there, it had a brief stop at Showtime before landing at HBO under former entertainment president Carolyn Strauss, where it remained for about three and a half years, Wells said.
 
“Then the new administration came in and they were back and forth on it,” he said. “We did notes on it for about a year and then they decided they didn’t want to do it.”
 
The series, which scored Showtime’s biggest series debut for a drama in seven years with 982,000 viewers for its premiere Sunday, then returned to Showtime under former entertainment president Robert Greenblatt.
 
Wells and company had done some work on the script and after securing William H. Macy to play the family’s drunk father — a name that was on Greenblatt’s short list of talent — the series picked up full steam a year and a half ago.
 
“That was easy in a really, really hard way,” Wells said of the ordeal. “I always thought it was terrific material. There are archetypes in here about how a lot of families live and the people and things that we deal with. We’re trying to make a point — and to make you laugh.
 
“It really is a world in which a lot of people live and have to survive and I was always very, very attracted to that,” Wells said.
 
Shameless airs at 10 p.m. on Sundays on Showtime.